TOURISM-CARIBBEAN: Mergers in Europe Cause Jitters

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Aug 20 2001 (IPS) - The globalisation of the tourism industry poses risks and challenges for Caribbean island nations, many of which depend nearly exclusively on that sector of the economy, warn Cuban officials.

In recent years, the globalisation process has been characterised by capital flows in search of more lucrative alternatives, which has led to mergers between large tour operators and to a modification of the industry from the form it had taken since the 1970s.

Cuba’s Deputy Minister of Tourism, Eduardo Rodríguez, cited the cases of Germany and Britain as illustrative of what is occurring in the process of the increasing concentration of capital which, he said, could culminate in the existence of no more than five companies dominating the European market as early as 2010.

Thanks to mergers and acquisitions, two German consortiums, Preussag and C and C/Touristic, currently account for 40 million clients, 179 planes and 180,000 beds, while the British consortiums Airtours and First Choice control 20 million clients and 82 planes.

“The globalisation process poses a risk of incalculable dimensions” for Caribbean island nations, which lack their own airlines and are located in a region where American Airlines has a corner on 70 percent of the market, Rodríguez stated in the latest issue of the Cuban tourism magazine Destinos.

The official underlined the need for clear projections of what can be expected in the future, as well as a common regional tourism policy that stands above the interests of particular companies or countries.

The tourism industry in the Caribbean takes in more than 18 billion dollars in annual revenues, offers 900,000 direct jobs, and attracts over 20 million arrivals a year – 45 percent of whom come from the United States and 25 percent from Europe.

Although the United States’ four decades-old economic and trade embargo against Cuba has been largely successful in stemming the flow of U.S. visitors to this socialist nation, hundreds of thousands of Canadians and Europeans visit each year.

In fact, since 1996, Cuba has been one of five Caribbean island nations – along with Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas and Jamaica – that receive more than one million arrivals annually.

Rodríguez stressed that the region must also keep in mind that inadequate sanitation and health infrastructure and unequal distribution of wealth, which create a culture medium for violence and social unrest, hurt the tourism sector’s growth potential.

“The ease with which diseases cross oceans and borders increases the chances of outbreaks and epidemics,” including HIV/AIDS, “all of which has an effect on people’s travel plans,” the official pointed out.

Indeed, while Cuba still has a low incidence of HIV/AIDS, nine of the 12 countries in the Americas with the highest prevalence of AIDS are in the Caribbean, according to the United Nations joint programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

Governments in the region must thus urgently adopt an integrated programme to tackle these increasingly pressing challenges, said Rodríguez.

Early this year, a decision by German and British tour operators and airlines to reduce flights to the Caribbean triggered alarm in the tourism industry in this region.

Scheduling changes in Britannia Airways flights from Germany to the Dominican Republic alone drove seven hotels in that Caribbean nation under and a number of others to the brink of bankruptcy, the press reported last May.

It is clear that the frequency of flights to the Caribbean has declined, and our countries must pull together to confront that situation, said Jean Holder, the secretary-general of the Caribbean Tourism Organisation.

Experts say the troubles experienced by hoteliers in the Dominican Republic constituted just one illustration of the vulnerability of small Caribbean economies to decisions adopted in the region’s main markets for tourists.

The World Bank projects that the global economy will grow 2.2 percent this year, just over half of last year’s four percent, mainly due to the slowdown in the United States, Europe and Japan.

The World Bank’s annual report predicted that the rate of economic growth of industrialised nations would slide from 3.6 percent in the year 2000 to 1.6 percent this year.